


Normal

by johnwatsonswindmachine



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Character Study, Ficlet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-28
Updated: 2012-07-28
Packaged: 2017-11-10 22:47:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/471554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/johnwatsonswindmachine/pseuds/johnwatsonswindmachine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I'd like to apologize to grammar, especially commas and conjunctions. Also alliteration and assonance. I plead author's voice.</p>
    </blockquote>





	Normal

**Author's Note:**

> I'd like to apologize to grammar, especially commas and conjunctions. Also alliteration and assonance. I plead author's voice.

The realization that he is not normal is not a sudden one. It creeps and crawls into his consciousness, urged on by the words of the world around him that come when he is himself, unguarded. In his childhood, it's corraborated by the preoccupations of his peers, how they gush over crushes, giggle at gossip, and prize frivolity over facts. It's supported by each time he tells the truth and is punished for it, not because he's wrong, but because he doesn't say it right. 

 

And so his suspicions grow, and a hypothesis forms: He is not normal.

 

He tests it as he would any hypothesis: with rigor and repetition, varying factors and situations, then calculating the statistics of his results. He does it all in his head, and this, he realizes, is another datum to support his hypothesis. Normal people don't do complex statistical analyses in their heads. Normal people don't conduct studies to determine their normality. They just know; they just are.

 

But how do they know? And so he studies that, too. He pays attention to minutiae and begins to do more than see. He begins to observe. He learns the correlation between the apparent and the abstract, notices the clues left by both living and dead. He pieces them together, follows a trail of deductive reasoning until he finds truth. And he can't turn it off, not really, not all the way, but that's alright. He doesn't want to. He likes it, most of the time, because when he does it, he's on the inside of knowledge. He holds secrets in his head, and though they're not the secrets of normality, they're better, because they're things that matter. And so he keeps doing it.

 

And that, they tell him, is wrong, is not normal. But that's fine, he knows, all fine, because normal is a hateful word, full of constricting rules and petty priorities and unthinking adherance to collective thought. It's a contorsion of his self and a blunting of his mind, and perhaps the most painful way to die. 

 

So if they call him a freak, so be it. Their hatred may sting, but he can withstand it, because the only thing worse than being a freak, he knows, is being like them.


End file.
